A separate chapter is the story of the Slovak Attorney General Maroš Žilinka. The man in whom not only the political power after the change of Fico’s hegemony, but also the public, had hopes, to put it mildly, trampled on them.
In the euphoria of the purge, Zilinka was one of at least four candidates who were not only qualified but generally considered honorable. He was elected and everyone expected him to trigger a purge in the prosecutor’s office. Among other things, it ironically served him well that his killing was probably ordered by Marian Kočner. According to the public, this was proof enough that he had nothing to do with the corrupt system.
However, everyone was soon in for an unpleasant surprise. Žilinka made his first and last appearance in a media interview, when he unconvincingly explained on Ta3 television why he immediately stopped the investigation into the involvement of Slovak forces and the Interior Minister for Smer-SD, Robert Kaliňák, in the kidnapping of a Vietnamese citizen, which we wrote about a few pages above (see 8.3, subsection Kidnapping of a Vietnamese). Then followed silence; only changing statuses on Facebook, where he threatened critics, cried about how strict everyone was on him, and presented infantile pictures from his private life. But worst of all: he was spreading pro-Russian propaganda. This may have come as a surprise to the uninitiated viewer; however, one of the authors of the History of Corruption had been following his pro-Russian activities for several years.
For example, after his appointment – already during the Ukrainian conflict and just before the massive Russian invasion – the Slovak Prosecutor General announced a visit to the 300th anniversary of the Russian, and therefore Soviet, prosecutor’s office.
He did so, moreover, just after criticising the DCA defence treaty with the United States. The Attorney General’s Office has raised 35 objections to the agreement, including the risk of increased noise at airports and the danger to Slovakia if the US military were to place nuclear weapons under the Tatra Mountains. Many of these points concerned areas in which the prosecutor’s office has no competence and does not understand.
Žilinka, who otherwise does not communicate publicly, confirmed that this is proactive political overwork with a status on his Facebook page. Communicating à la Donald Trump is the result of understanding any important public office as a role in a reality show. Maroš Žilinka has long pandered to extremist and ultraconservative audiences, probably because he is closely associated with the Sme Rodina political party, which pushed for his appointment as Attorney General.
It must be remembered that he went far beyond what he should have been doing and acted as an active politician seeking preferential points. However, in the case of activities helping the undemocratic Russian regime, there may be a problem elsewhere.
Perhaps this is just an exaggerated construction , but in the case of people who have a taste for power and whose values in life are defined mainly by achieving the attributes of luxury, this scepticism is misplaced.
Putin’s regime makes it a point, both internally and externally, to challenge those who criticise it. In doing so, he often uses former top politicians, but also other visible public figures in democratic countries, especially in the European Union.
How does it work? Seemingly innocuous and insignificant visits to Russia by prominent figures from, for example, the European Union, are often associated with an interesting honorarium, which the person in question receives, for example, for giving a speech or attending a conference. More often than not, the persons in question, as friends of the regime, are also gifted in kind, and not infrequently such a visit can result in some quid pro quo – for example, the access of a recommended person from the Union to Russia’s heavily closed business.
Maroš Žilinka visited Russia in 2011 when, as Deputy Minister of the Interior, he visited Russian military circles to show his gratitude and appreciation for the fallen soldiers of the Red Army who participated in the liberation of Slovak territory during World War II. This is certainly a moral-sounding activity, and there is nothing to fault it. However, it was a strange involvement of a non-competent Ministry of the Interior and a peculiar formality – it is not customary for army circles to be visited by someone from non-army circles on behalf of the other side.
This is proof that it was mainly Žilinek’s personal activity. However, after his appointment as head of the prosecutor’s office, it took on more pernicious dimensions, affecting Slovakia’s security and arousing the distrust of Slovakia’s allies in the European Union and NATO.
After Maroš Žilinka’s active unjustified negotiations with the Prosecutor General of Russia in the summer of 2021, Žilinka was going to visit Igor Viktorovic Krasnov, who is on the sanctions lists of the EU and other communities of which Slovakia is a member, on the occasion of the 300th anniversary of the Russian Prosecutor’s Office.
The problem was that Žilinka held a highly visible and important position, the principle of which is, among other things, to uphold the democratic values of independence of investigative processes and the preparation of indictments. He came to the Russian Federation at a time when the prosecutor’s office there, which had successfully destroyed independent media, was launching a purge in the non-profit sector.
In addition to consolidating power and eliminating any critics, the Russian prosecutor’s office has also been responsible for the lives of thousands of political prisoners – journalists, politicians and activists – who have been put behind bars in trumped-up trials and have subsequently succumbed to torturous conditions.
The Russian prosecutor’s office has also been responsible for sweeping up politically motivated murders, murders in organised crime environments and acts of domestic terrorism. The closed investigations into the circumstances of several explosions in Russian cities in 1999, which suggested the involvement of the Russian secret services in acts that claimed the lives of Russian citizens, speak for themselves. The blasts were labelled, without evidence, as terrorist attacks and led to the war in Chechnya and Vladimir Putin’s rise to power.
Ladomirova
Žilinka’s activity in the case of spreading disinformation by the Russian side about the World War I war cemetery in the village of Ladomirova in the Svidník district was also significant. This was a sad but frighteningly functional part of the campaign to turn public opinion in Slovakia towards the Kremlin and against the West.
The Embassy of the Russian Federation in Slovakia acts as a cell of the Kremlin’s disinformation machine. Through official channels, it has spread the crudest nonsense, including that the Americans are developing chemical weapons in Ukraine to kill the Slavs. In Slovakia, the Russian embassy posts an average of 200 posts a week on Facebook. By comparison, in the Czech Republic it is about 50.
In one of the misinformation, it stated that they found destroyed graves in the cemetery of the soldiers of the Russian Imperial Army in the village of Ladomirova. It even wrote in the report and on social media that the graves had been razed to the ground on the orders of the mayor.
However, the police immediately reported that the Russian Ambassador to Slovakia, Igor Bratchikov, had lied. It also pointed out that the mayor of the village needed protection because he had faced numerous death threats after the Russian hoax.
The Russian Embassy’s lie was immediately shared by the Attorney General Maroš Žilinka. Žilinka even launched an investigation. When the county prosecutor’s office, after a long investigation into the nonsense, concluded what everyone outside the virtual space of Facebook knew – that it was a reconstruction of the fence to beautify the historic cemetery – Žilinka began investigating the county prosecutor’s office’s decision, which is also ongoing at the time of writing these lines.
Maroš Žilinka’s performance of his duties is a separate chapter that requires its own commentary. His political activities, however, showed an unprecedented intoxication with power and raised the question of whether Slovak legislation should not provide for a broader possibility of competence actions against the prosecutor’s office.
Maroš Žilinka’s activity briefly outlined two possibilities. Either he is doing it for selfish motives, or he truly admires the undemocratic regime that suppresses freedom. Neither option can please us. And Žilinka knows what signals he is sending.
However, Žilinka represents the most important thing for the Fico system not through his pro-Kremlin activities, but directly in criminal proceedings. He has delayed or directly thwarted a number of indictments through Section 363 of the Criminal Procedure Code. This allows the Attorney General to irreversibly cancel a criminal trial at the stage of preparing charges. If the Attorney General uses the section, the investigation is virtually over. The charges can be reinstated, but with a different evidentiary basis. The Attorney General’s Office has used the section in hundreds of cases a year, but the specificity of the Zilink decisions is that it has greatly overused the section in Special Prosecution cases, often in cases involving prominent individuals. This is also why he is nicknamed Mr. 363. Let’s complete the short list of suspects he has intervened with the paragraph: Robert Fico, Robert Kaliňák, Tibor Gašpar, Norbert Bödör, Vladimír Pčolinský, Zoroslav Kollár, Jaroslav Haščák and Peter Kažimír.
The bizarre part of the matter is that during the public hearing in his candidacy for the post of Attorney General, Zilinka talked about the fact that Section 363 must be amended or repealed because, as an element without any control or remedy, it allows for influenced or erroneous final decision-making and in a way interferes with purely judicial competencies.
